THE firebrand post-war Left-winger Aneurin Bevan, one of the founders of the NHS, once proclaimed that: “The language of priorities is the religion of socialism.”

LEFTIST: But Ed Miliband could learn about priorities from Aneurin Bevan [REX]

The basic point was that there isn’t enough money to do everything at once and therefore a socialist needs to rigorously prioritise which are the causes and people meriting most urgent investment.

It was a good sentiment and one that every promise-making politician should bear in mind. Alas the Labour Party seldom, if ever, has done.

For most of the time it has done the opposite: pretended to be all things to all men and then spent indiscriminately like a shopaholic at the Harrods sale until the approach of national bankruptcy.

It was a desire to shed this reputation for throwing other people’s money at lost causes that led Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to proclaim before the 1997 general election that Labour would be “wise spenders not big spenders” and had “no plans for any tax rises at all”.

And yet 13 years later outgoing Labour Treasury minister Liam Byrne left a note for his coalition successor admitting that “there is no money”.

Ed Miliband undoubtedly sees himself as being in the Left-wing tradition of Bevan and yet he doesn’t get the bit about priorities. He simply refuses to be straight about which policy areas or classes of people he would spend more on and which would have to do with less.

Mr Miliband alighted on the idea that a key priority would be to make life better for the middle classes were he to get to Downing Street

Despite repeated collisions with financial reality Labour insists on believing that a crude form of Keynesian economics – under which the state always seeks to borrow more – can fertilise a magic money tree sufficient to ensure every competing interest is well funded.

Hence this week Mr Miliband alighted on the idea that a key priority would be to make life better for the middle classes were he to get to Downing Street. “Our country cannot become collectively better off unless Britain has a strong and vibrant middle class,” he wrote.

“The cost of living crisis is not just about people on tax credits, zero hours contracts and the minimum wage. It is about middle class families who never dreamt that life would be such a struggle.”

Yet it is the burden of taxation that is one of the chief restraints on middle class living standards and that can only be reduced if the state spends less money and if a reliable and tough-minded plan is put in place to nurture economic growth. Neither is on offer from Miliband.

In fact he has opposed every coalition cut in the biggest ticket item of spending – the welfare budget, condemning ministers for attacking the living standards of the poorest.

Miliband still pledges allegiance to Labour child poverty reduction targets that tell adults who do not wish ever to work that they can live indefinitely on benefits so long as they bring into the world offspring that they cannot afford to support with their own resources.

That makes a nonsense of his pledge to turn the welfare state back into a contributory system, paying out more to those with the best record of paying in.

Miliband began his Labour leadership talking about the plight of the “squeezed middle”. But a squeeze implies pressure from two directions – in this case the fat cats at the top and also a chronically dependent underclass at the bottom.

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But he no longer uses that phrase much, preferring to push the idea of the “99 per cent against the one per cent”.

Yet there are nothing like enough super-rich people around who can be squeezed sufficiently to finance a living standards uplift for both the hard-working middle classes and the non-working poor. And if you squeeze the rich too hard they always have the option of leaving the country. So a choice has to be made. Priorities must be set.

Will a future Labour government – via low taxation, a less overweening state and an end to meanstesting – back the middle class virtues of family stability, hard work and self-reliance? Or will it revert to type by further taxing the people who have worked for their money and then “redistributing” it to those who have not? I think we already know the answer to that question.

As Chris Patten once said (about the only thing he ever got right): “Dogs bark, cats miaow and Labour governments put up taxes.”

Certainly Miliband’s lack of a clear economic policy is starting to cost him in the opinion polls. Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday was a lamentably one-sided affair, with David Cameron knocking lumps out of the opposition leader while the once bumptious shadow chancellor Ed Balls sat in forlorn silence like a moth-eaten old lion whose teeth have all been drawn.

Perhaps the ghost of Aneurin Bevan could be summoned in order to give the lost Labour leader some night classes in the language of priorities.